Spike Hamiltonians arise from optimization instances for which the adiabatic algorithm provably out performs classical simulated annealing. In this work, we study the efficiency of the adiabatic algorithm for solving the “the Hamming weight with a spike” problem by analyzing the scaling of the spectral gap at the critical point for various sizes of the barrier. Our main result is a rigorous lower bound on the minimum spectral gap for the adiabatic evolution when the bit-symmetric cost function has a thin but polynomially high barrier, which is based on a comparison argument and an improved variational ansatz for the ground state. We also adapt the discrete WKB method for the case of abruptly changing potentials and compare it with the predictions of the spin coherent instanton method which was previously used by Farhi, Goldstone and Gutmann. Finally, our improved ansatz for the ground state leads to a method for predicting the location of avoided crossings in the excited energy states of the thin spike Hamiltonian, and we use a recursion relation to understand the ordering of some of these avoided crossings as a step towards analyzing the previously observed diabatic cascade phenomenon.
Asymptotics of the spectral gap with applications to the theory of simulated annealing